The Sea Beach Line (29 page)

I was intimately familiar with the Lubavitchers, because they had a Chabad house at Oberlin. The house was maintained by a young rabbi and rebbetzin from New York who hosted Shabbos dinners and study sessions for curious Jewish students like myself. I'd attended many of these, and learned a lot of things. The rabbi had taken it upon himself to familiarize us with foundational Jewish texts. I found it hard to stay interested in Mishnah, or anything relating to the minutiae of religious law and observance, but I was entranced with the volumes of the
Midrash Rabbah
, which offered story upon story about biblical characters. I was also interested in the rabbi's accounts of the Hasidic masters. He was an ordinary man from Queens, but he had a legacy that stretched back for three centuries.

One story that had always stuck with me was how the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe had reacted when a tsarist officer put a revolver to his head. “That scares a man who believes in one world and many gods,” he said, “but it doesn't mean anything to a man who believes in one God and two worlds.” This fascinated me. I didn't want to be someone who was scared of a police interrogation—like the one that might still be coming because of my 911 call. I couldn't quite convince myself there was nothing to fear in this world, but I did believe in another one beyond this one. I didn't completely understand, though, why we should have absolute faith in the next world. Yes, it existed, but what if a third world existed beyond that one? And yet another world beyond that? Maybe a person should just choose a world and live in it.

The rabbi at the Chabad house had been generally tolerant of my questions, even encouraging, until the night I showed up for Shabbos dinner tripping on acid, and made a scene explaining to everyone that
I had seen angels myself, and could teach the rabbi a thing or two about holy mysteries. The next evening, after sundown of course, he called to say that I'd scared the rebbetzin, and was no longer welcome in their house. The excommunication didn't bother me so much as the fact that when I came down, I couldn't actually remember having seen any angels. Now that I was in the streets, seeing real ghosts and real flames, these antics were embarrassing for me to recall.

The yeshiva boys approached our table. Rayna gave them a wary look, and told me she had to walk off for a bit. They must have reminded her of the boys in the community she had fled from. Maybe they reminded her of the boy she was supposed to marry.

“You are Jewish, maybe?” one of them asked me. I was wearing my Yankees cap over my kippah. I thought about lying and saying no, so they'd go away, but I found that I very badly wanted to tie tefillin. Not because I needed spiritual solace, but because the ritual was ordering, and my mind was disordered with anxiety.

“Wonderful! What's your name?”

“Izzy.”

“Your Hebrew name.”

“Right. Yitzhak.”

“And your mother's name?”

“Ruth.” As always, Alojzy's name didn't seem to matter to anyone.

Bernie had taught me how to tie tefillin. It was not a daily ritual for him, but he did do it occasionally. I had found it intriguing at first, but fairly rote, and soon lost interest. Al, thanks to scientific communist indoctrination, found all such rituals superstitious and absurd. At the Chabad house, though, I'd learned that for the tying of tefillin to be truly meaningful, you have to tie the straps in such a way that they make the Hebrew letter shin—
—on your hand. On the parchment in the tefillin boxes are letters written in ink, and you must write a letter on your skin to bind them to you. The story of the world is written in letters, and you must become part of that story.

I held out my arms so the yeshiva bochers could wind the straps. After they had helped me tie myself up, I covered my eyes to pray. I tried to feel the elation, the feeling that I was connecting myself to
something higher. Mostly though, I just felt the tight leather straps binding my skin and thought of the man whose name I bore, and how he must have felt so long ago, up on Mount Moriah. Trusting his father so much as they walked up the mountain. Then beginning to wonder why they carried no animal to sacrifice. Slowly piecing the terrible story together. Then seeing the knife rise above him.

The next day, Mendy showed me an article in the
Daily News
about a news vendor named Suhaib Abdul-hak who had been arrested on suspicion of staging the firebombing of his own newsstand. There was a picture of the burned newsstand; the metal structure was still standing, but had twisted, blackened, and collapsed inward. The article, which was only a few sentences long, offered no clear motive. An eyewitness saw Abdul-hak fleeing the scene, and he was picked up shortly after the arson. Evidence found at the scene connected him to the crime.

The paper also had an article about Andrew's firm—Haber Simson—being under investigation by the SEC. Apparently, they had been lying to their clients about returns. I didn't know enough about the business world to know if this was a routine thing or a serious issue. Andrew would have to explain it to me the next time I saw him. At the moment, I was too fixated on Abdul-hak's story to spend much time on a business article.

The police had never come looking for me, and now that Abdul-hak had been arrested, I guessed they never would. If they had collared Abdul-hak for the crime, they had no reason to believe anything more complicated was afoot. An economically struggling news vendor wanted an easy way out of his lease. Or if he owned the newsstand, then he wanted the insurance payout. Either way, I'm sure the police had connected the dots. An open-and-shut case. If Abdul-hak had some far-fetched alternate story for them, it was just because he was trying to save his skin. They weren't going to waste time following up on it. Whatever trace of drugs or criminal activity had been present was carried out in the duffel bag long before the fire inspector showed
up. Probably Abdul-hak had decided his safest bet was to make a false confession. What was he going to do, tell the police rival drug dealers targeted him?

“This surprises me,” said Mendy, shaking his head.

“How so?” I asked. What did Mendy know about the situation? Was it as secret as I thought it was?

“Well, I know Abdul-hak, a little. Nice guy. He always seemed very proud of his newsstand. You'd see him out there, touching up the paint. He came here from Yemen, with the dream of being a business owner. An aspiring petty capitalist. He always talked about opening up a corner store or small grocery, but the newsstand was his first step. I can't imagine he'd do this to his own place.

“But you never know,” Mendy continued. “Maybe he was in debt over his head, or there was some other situation. I know he'd had his ups and downs in business. I think he had his fingers in a few things, other than the newsstand. You never know what's going on with people.”

“No,” I said, feeling slightly guilty. “You never know. Who's to say what happened?” I hadn't thought about the man's story or dreams when I framed him, any more than Al thought about the lives and dreams of the Syrian soldiers when he had to call in the air strike. He couldn't afford to. I wanted to hold on to my and Rayna's little home, I wanted to find my father, and I wanted to stay in the good graces of these scary men who knew him. I took care of me and mine. This stranger's life was not my problem. Abdul-hak wasn't just a hardworking immigrant; he was also a drug dealer. He knew the rules of the game. I was learning them myself. The guilt began to leave me. I did what I had to do. There was no looking back.

14

THE STORAGE UNIT SMELLED
of rubbing alcohol, and glue, and old paper, and my sweat, which hardened into my clothes when I came in from pushing the cart. The stiff, oily cloth rubbed against my skin as I walked, leaving my thighs and armpits painfully chafed. I kept smelling gasoline and smoke on my clothes, though I had to remind myself it was from all the car exhaust on the street, not from the newsstand fire.

Rayna also smelled of sweat, though her scent was more womanly. In such close quarters I couldn't deny the reality of her corporeal form. What I saw and heard could be illusions, or astral manifestations, but her smells were real.

It wasn't that we weren't sanitary. I kept a big bottle of Dr. Bronner's castile soap on hand, which we used as toothpaste, shampoo, and regular old body soap when we washed up in the restroom sinks. The harsh soap dried out my skin, and my desiccated hands were rubbed raw from pulling the ropes tight when I tied the boxes to the cart.

We used a lot of rubbing alcohol to keep the books clean and shiny and to clean up any food spills. Our bed was very close to the floor.
At night my sweat dried on my skin, binding my skin to the nylon of the air mattress when Rayna's tossing had pulled the bottom sheet away. My big nose, hanging off the edge of the mattress, was just two inches from the alcohol smell of the floor. It made me nauseous and it also made me want a drink. But better alcohol on the floor than cockroaches swarming, hiding in the pages of the books.

We were in dire need of a cleaning day, so we trekked uptown to my sister's apartment the Tuesday after the newsstand fire. Rayna had been living with me for over three weeks, and neither of us had showered during that time. The last time I had been up to Becca's was more than a month ago.

Rayna didn't seem very comfortable with the subway system. She hadn't left Boro Park by herself very often until she ran away. The elevated train line was a site of death in Galuth's painting; the subway tunnels were connected to Sheol in Rayna's account.

“The train can be disconcerting,” she said, when we were settled in our seats on the 6 train at Spring Street.

“Yes,” I agreed, though I had been riding it my whole life, and found it much less disconcerting than driving a car. But Rayna probably didn't know how to do that, either.

We stayed on the 6 local at Union Square, rather than scrambling for the 4 or 5 express. Passengers piled in and surrounded us. An overweight businessman was pressed against Rayna's right side. She held her laundry bag tight with her right hand, and on to my arm with her left. If I went to jail for the arson, or anything else, Rayna would be left alone. I could handle the incarceration; I would keep my head down, and read. They have to give you a Bible, if nothing else. Freedom of religion. But I would feel terrible for abandoning her.

Seeing Rayna's discomfort on the train reminded me of riding the subway the first time I tripped on acid, and how it had felt strange for a long time afterward. This was during my junior year of high school, not too long after I turned down Al's offer to go west with him. I told Rayna the story as we rode uptown. She knew, vaguely, that people did drugs—she saw junkies and crackheads in the streets everyday—but she didn't know what LSD was, specifically, and I had to explain it to her.